


A Rose By Any Other Name

by verboseDescription



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: (you know the one), Allusions to death, Backstory, Dissociation, I guess some things happen?, Peter is a Sad Boy, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-07 23:08:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11068992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verboseDescription/pseuds/verboseDescription
Summary: If he hadn't met Mag, Peter might have grown up to be someone completely different.But thanks to Mag, he didn't really grow up into "one" anyways.An exploration of Peter's past, I guess





	A Rose By Any Other Name

Peter Nureyev is only six years old when he meets Mag. The man smiles at him like he’s the best thing in the world and says he knows Peter’s parents.

Peter is six, but not stupid. He never knew his parents, not long enough to form any real memories of them, but he knows Mag probably isn’t telling the truth. There’s a host of reasons why an adult would want a kid to like him, and nothing he can think of is good.

But Peter’s six, and an orphan. He wants to believe there’s something better for him. He wants to believe on day his parents will come back and bring him to a house of gold where he’ll want for nothing and grow up happier than anything he could dream of.

So when Peter whispers, “Prove it,” it comes out more of a plea than a demand.

 

According to Mag, his father was a revolutionary. Or, they would have been, if not for the government. He had lived near Brahma’s capital, New Kinsasha, but knew better than to let his son get involved. War was no place for a child, after all, so Peter’s father had hid him away where no one would find him—not even Mag, who had been looking all this time.

He had been looking for a way to free Brahma from its guardian angel, the system that was the crux of all recent political turmoil, the system everyone knew of and prayed it wouldn’t look at them, and had needed someone like Mag to help him accomplish just that.

See, Mag was a thief by nature—and don’t look so surprised kid, we all have to make a living somehow—so he could help Peter’s father get past all of the lasers and safety measures to destroy the cursed machine once and for all. Now, Mag’s no activist, but Peter’s father had sparked a fire of revolution in him. It had taken him only moments of speaking for Mag to agree to take the plans to the Guardian Angel System. Peter’s father had smiled, thanked him fervently, and said it was time to get back to his son, the only person who mattered more to him than saving Brahma. So Peter’s father had exited Mag’s hideout—

\--and was promptly killed. Shot down by a laser in an instance, so fast that neither man could react until it was over.

And so, the Angel remained watching over the city, just as it always had.

 

“But you had the plans!” Peter replies accusingly. “You could have saved us by yourself!”

“It’s not really a one-person job, kiddo,” Mag says with a good natured sigh. “I’d need a partner.”

“I’ll do it,” Peter says, almost interrupting. He had been swayed by the story, moved at the thought that someone had tried to do something to save the planet from its bureaucrats, and had sacrificed himself in the process. “I can help you.”

“You sure?” Mag asks, looking genuinely concerned “It won’t be easy.”

“I don’t care,” Peter tries to stand tall, to show Mag he’s not just some grubby kid. “I can do it.”

And when Peter goes home with Mag, he leaves behind all remnants of the truth of his birth. He becomes a different Peter Nureyev, one willing to fight for everything and willing to be any _one_ he needed to in order to accomplish that.

He becomes a Peter Nureyev Mag needs.

It’s the first time he changes who he is for someone else's sake.

 

 

 

Peter spends his first week living with Mag watching the propaganda streams the government had paid for and eating meals that consisted mainly of ice cream and food rations.

Mag had wanted Peter to see how convincing people could be when they had power. He wanted to make sure Peter would never fall for their lies, that he wouldn’t believe in any “greater good” they promised.

“The rich only care about themselves, Pete,” Mag tells him on several different occasions. “And even when they don’t, they don’t know how to help. I’m sure whoever made the Guardian Angel thought he was doing the right thing—or told the press that at least—but did he think about how it’d get used? No! Not one of the people involved ever thought about anything but how famous it’d make them.”

Anytime Mag would tell him this, Peter would nod vigorously. The rich didn’t care. Those in power felt they didn’t need to. But someone needed to think about the rest of Brahma, and Peter knew it would be him. It made him feel almost noble.

He never asked about the ice cream. Sometimes it’s best not to question good things.

 

 

Peter’s first real mission comes almost a year later. He knows Mag could feel him getting restless, and they both knew his skills were good enough to be put to some use. He could lock pick their entire building with his eyes closed and had stolen numerous small items from their neighbors with outstanding success—none of them had ever even noticed anything was missing, and even if they did, they wouldn’t think to blame their missing TV remote on a neighbor’s angelic child—and all recent games of “hide-and-seek” had ended with Peter very dramatically appearing out of thin air and telling Mag he wouldn’t be able to find anyone in a glass labyrinth.

Peter was a bit of a bratty child.

But the point was, he was _bored._

Mag had promised him that they’d do great things together, and yet Peter had barely left Mag’s hideout at all, until one day Mag hands Peter a floorplan and tells him it’s time to put what he’s learned to good use.

“Don’t worry if things don’t go according to plan, Pete,” Mag tells him. “I’ll be there to watch your back. And if trouble comes, you can just disappear.”

So he becomes Peter Daire for a day and robs a house.

 

Mag drives them to a mansion that’s so tall and fancy that Peter can immediately tell it has no less than five chandeliers and at least two portraits of the owners. Mag pretends to be a housecleaner and tells the woman at home about his countless new and innovative cleaners that’ll help him make the mansion look newer than it ever had been while Peter sneaks inside.

The point isn’t for Peter to take everything. The point is for him to take as much as he can without getting caught. The point is for him to show Mag he has what it takes. If he can remember the floor plan, he can remember where the more valuable decorations might be and if he uses his head, he’ll know which ones he can take without causing too much suspicion or making too much noise. And of course, he’ll be operating under a timeline.

Peter manages to snatch an array of jewelry and two mirrors encrusted with diamonds. When Mag sees this, he ruffles Peter’s hair and says he did good. Peter beams.

They sell everything the next day and Mag takes them out to eat to celebrate.

 

It becomes apparent after a couple of years that Peter’s developing his own style to thieving.

Mag’s content to always be Mag. And Peter certainly doesn’t mind being Peter. It does make things easier. But Peter needs a _story._ Mag’s always doing things the simple way, and it’s a powerful way for sure, but it’s not the way Peter wants to do things.

Peter’s grown up listening to cover stories instead of bed time tales. His life could be told like a series of stories bound in one great book. He liked to imagine what kind of person he would be, if the story he was telling everyone was actually his own. What would he be like? Would Peter Ransom, foreign dignitary, get along with his father as well as Peter Nureyev got along with Mag? Would they fight? Would they make up?

Mag thought his questions were silly, Peter knew, though the man would never say it to his face. The day they left to destroy the Angel, Peter drew worry lines on his youthful skin despite Mag’s insistence that no one would know how young he really was.

“Still,” Peter protests. “It never hurts to be on the safe side.”

Peter’s been pretending to be an adult since he was fourteen. He knows that, if he tried, he could get a nervous politician to believe he wasn’t just a teenager in a fancy outfit.

But he likes to imagine Peter Ransom is a mask he can draw on, or story he can just slip into. He likes to think that if he does this one thing, no one would ever dare question his cover.

It’s not like he did that much, either. The illusion would be broken if he came across anyone who actually knew him—and, excluding Mag, that was something he was severely lacking—or if he simply lost his composure.

But it was enough to make him feel that everything would go according to plan.

 

It doesn’t, of course.

The visit goes perfectly fine but once they’re actually looking for the Guardian Angel, things go bad and it strikes Peter that this is the one contingency they never planned for. But of course, why would they?

How could they know that it would end like this, with Peter holding a knife in shaking hands as Mag refuses to move? How could he see what would happen next, that when he took a step forward it’d be all over and Mag was—

 

 

Mag was—

 

 

 

_(Later, when Peter is older and finds someone who understands him, so deep and with so much love that he feels no dark past could hold a candle to this future, he admits that despite it all, he wishes there had been another way._

_“I don’t regret killing him,” Peter says softly, tracing his fingers on the skin of the person beside him. “But I still mourned him. Despite everything, he was still the man who raised me. And sometimes I want to believe that some of it was genuine. Is it strange, do you think, to be so sad about something you don’t regret?”_

_“No,” Juno says. “I don’t think it’s strange at all.”)_

 

 

After everything, he tosses his suit in the nearest garbage and takes the next shuttle off planet. He doesn’t fully process it about it until months later, when he’s watching a movie with a boy his age and he suddenly starts crying. It’s not even a sad movie.

The boy offers to walk him home, but Peter refuses with a sly smile and asks to walk _him_ home instead because he can think of some _much_ more interesting things to do there. The boy gulps and asks if he’s sure.

“I mean, Lucius,” he says. “You were just crying!”

“I was just thinking about how happy I was to have spent my afternoon with you,” Peter coos, snuggling up against him. The boy turns red and when they kiss all Peter can think about is everything he left behind on Brahma. He doesn’t miss his comms. He doesn’t need them. He doesn’t miss his clothes. He can always buy new ones. He doesn’t know _why_ he misses his home—Mag’s been switching hideouts on a nearly yearly basis since Peter had come to live with him—it wasn’t like he had a specific place to _miss._

And it wasn’t like he wasn’t used to taking only the bare minimum with him from hideout to hideout _._ There should be nothing to feel nostalgia for. Living without Mag had been hell, and Peter didn’t want to think he missed any part of living _with_ him.

But he did.

 

 

 

Or maybe, the Peter Nureyev Mag had told him he was was just a story he wanted to slip into, one last time.

 

 

 

Peter comes to the boy’s house in the middle of the night and steals the most valuable painting they have.

Suddenly, he’s sickened by his latest alias. Lucius Clay, who goes on dates with rich boys and bats his eyes until they don’t notice he’s pocketed their house keys and stolen their wallet. Lucius Clay was terrible. The boy had dried his tears and asked if there was anything he could do to help, and Lucius had stolen from him without a second thought.

Well, it wasn’t like he couldn’t afford it. And it’s not like Peter wasn’t _trying_ to be the kind of person you wanted to take home.

In any case, he resolves to leave the planet the next day. Being Lucius had been nice. He was vapid, he was sweet, and showed no signs of a tragic backstory. But it was time to move on.

Peter takes off his hat and stares at it for a moment. It’s ugly, but intentionally so. The kind of ugly that made you look like you knew you didn’t have to care what was stylish to look good. Peter hates this hat. He thinks he always has. Why did he even _buy_ this?

Under the dusty light of the planet’s artificial moon, Peter throws it in a river, and watches it float away.

And as it goes, so does he.

 

 

 

 

At the next planet, he’s Puck Hawthorn and he travels with a pack of teenage artists that tease him about his drawing ability and say for every bad piece of bad art, there’s an art collector with very specific tastes. Puck is likable, everyone says. He speaks in a slow drawl that Peter uses to mask his unfamiliarity with the language and is agreeable enough that he seems like a good sport, but not so much so that he seemed spineless. Peter lost himself in Puck easily, a fact that both relieved and terrified him.

If he keeps doing this, he thinks, there’ll be nothing of Peter Nureyev left.

He doesn’t know if this is a bad thing.

When he’s with the artists, he doesn’t have to be a traumatized orphan. He can hear them rant about school and pretend he understands their complaints. He can watch them spray signs of a revolution on walls and act like there wasn’t a time when he’d be too worried about lasers to consider doing the same. He could pretend that nothing he experienced would make him believe that what they did was hopeless.

All he cares is that they _like_ him. Or at least, they like Puck.

Close enough.

Jem Ortega learned Sol Common from her mother, and teaches it to Puck to hear him stumble with the unfamiliar vowels.

“Where did you say you’re from again?” she asks. “I know you said you knew Rim Basic, but I don’t know if I’ve ever heard an accent like yours before.”

She wouldn’t. Brahma didn’t give other planets a lot of tourists, though they did give out a fair amount refugees. Not to here, though. It was too far away.

“Nowhere you’ve heard of,” Peter tells her. He had tried to mask his Brahmese accent, but every now and then he could feel in peeking through as he got more and more frustrated. Something to work on for next time, he thinks, only then just realizing that there would be a next time, and _of course_ there was.

What else was he going to do? Yes, he had friends _now_ but all of it was temporary. Best to leave while he was still liked and still had found memories of the people he left behind.

Jem just shrugs at his explanation and asks if he wants to know the history behind the language. She thinks it’ll help him learn, she explains.

“Are you going to teach me _Latin_?” Puck asks, horrified. Jem gives him a shove.

“Don’t be stupid, Pucker,” she tells him. “This is a history lesson.”

Peter thinks Jem would make a very good linguist if she stopped skipping school. He doesn’t think the school systems here were meant for people like Jem. If they were, they’d care more.

“I never paid much attention in history,” Puck says. “I suppose now is a good time as any to learn.”

Jem beams.

“So Sol is a pidgin language from Earth, right?” Jem begins. “We all know how that story goes. Technology got a bit greater, and the world got a bit smaller, so pretty soon people were picking up slang from across the globe until one day it became a dialect, and then, another day it became a language. Well, most of our languages were originally based on a couple of Earth ones. Go figure, right? So like, here we had a few different original settlers. Renaissance is _packed_ with Italians, and even though we all got here way after Sol Common was established, the memory of all our home languages stuck with us. So the Ren dialect of this region’s kind of flowy, and it’s got the same type of consonants as Italian. And all the people talk like they’re doing a performance. I guess that part’s not super important, though.”

“I have to learn everything that makes up Sol to learn anything else?” Puck frowns.

“I mean, no, but it wouldn’t _hurt_ ,” Jem tells him. She seems invested now, and more enthusiastic than he’s seen her. “Way out by Esperanza they still have Spanish as the official language—that’s where I’m from, originally—and I know there’s a galaxy where all of the official languages are Chinese dialects. And if you put those two together, you pretty much know Dajo Common.”

Jem gets up from her seat and tosses a bag of chips at her girlfriend who makes a noise of protest once it smacks her face.

“I guess all I’m saying is, the more you know, the easier things’ll be.”

 

 

 

 

 

And as it turns out, she’s right.

The more Peter knows, the more people he can be. The more people he can be, the more people he can convince that he’s someone they can depend on.

Peter Nureyev isn’t anyone good, of course. But they don’t know he’s Peter Nureyev.

He almost envies them for that.

The further he goes from Brahma, the further he gets from who he used to be. He doesn’t know where he’s running to but eventually it stops mattering. The next place he goes, he’s going to learn a new language and take something priceless before anyone knows to miss it. He’s going to go somewhere new. He’s going to have an adventure.

And wherever he goes, he won’t be Peter Nureyev.

**Author's Note:**

> This probably could be longer but its 10 pm and im gonna get woken up at like 7 so i wanna go to bed and i kinda wanna be done w/ this so im gonna do both of those rn. zzzzzz  
> Anyways, I hope you enjoyed!  
> Title is because of that shakespeare line. i figured pete'd like that


End file.
